# Mississippi Senator wants "public hanging" ??

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-senator-wants-public-hanging/824398>\
**Category:** Politics & Elections\
**Created:** [November 12, 2018, 8:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-senator-wants-public-hanging/824398 "2018-11-12T08:22:44Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 78

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**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\
**Post date:** [November 25, 2018, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mississippi-senator-wants-public-hanging/824398/78 "2018-11-25T19:14:27Z")

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> [@RTFirefly](#):
>
> Public hangings happened IN MY MOTHERFUCKING LIFETIME.
> 
> **SOME** And many were extralegal executions conducted without any judicial process. They were still public. Hell, they were big parties for the white folks, as photos of many of these instances of torture and execution, taken by attendees other than the perpetrators, show. The last [judicial](https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2014/08/last-public-execution-rainey-bethea/) public hanging was in 1936, and it was so distasteful that 20,000 people showed up to watch.
> 
> Extrajudicial public hangings, aka lynchings, continued for a few more decades, and were still very much a ‘thing’ during Cindy Hyde-Smith’s childhood. I’m not. I’m pointing out that extrajudicial lynchings of blacks that **WERE** conducted in public, were **public hangings**.
> 
> Ignorance fought? One can only hope.
> 
> ETA: Ninja’d by **Railer13** on the last judicial public hanging.

Nobody, before this comment, has equated the term “public hanging” with extrajudicial lynchings. The term public hanging has always and forever heretofore meant the legal method of execution conducted in most states in the 19th century.

I suppose the single public hanging conducted 82 years ago may qualify as within some elderly peoples’ lifetimes, but it was a legal judicial execution. Nothing about the term “public hanging” is equal to lynchings except in the minds of the left, and I’ll bet everyone equating those terms is voting for Espy (or would if they lived in MS).

This emotional screed is simply revisionist history.

ETA: To clarify, the comment by the candidate, not by the poster.

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